Students gather around a laptop computer listening to a podcast

Language & Identity in the African Experience Podcast Project

Students from Professor Jamie A. Thomas’ Spring 2017 linguistics seminar, Language and Identity in the African Experience, recently completed a semester long project creating a podcast series titled AFROLATINX PODCAST™ and an informative and media-rich companion website Language & Identity in the African Experience.

AfroLatinx Podcast™ “features the voices of Latinx people, offering a series of podcast episodes and interactive web content that analyzes the interconnected expressions of language and identity in the African Diaspora.” More information on the creation of the project is available on the AfroLatinx Podcast™ about page: http://ds.swarthmore.edu/language-and-identity/about/ .

The podcast was recorded in segments both on and off Swarthmore’s campus. Students utilized Garageband and Audacity audio editing applications to trim field recordings, record discussions, and mix final tracks for their podcast. These files were then uploaded to soundcloud for hosting, sharing, and embedding into a website developed with guidance from Swarthmore College Librarians. As mentioned in the ITS blog post, Podcasting in the Academics, Garageband is a powerful, easy to use tool that is a perfect introduction to podcast creation and is assessable on all Mac computers. If you’d like to know more about the technical side of the AFROLATINX PODCAST™ or how to implement a podcasting project within your courses please contact your Swarthmore Academic Technologists at acadtech@swarthmore.edu!